Do I Really Want a Rubber Stamp? (Part I)

One of the most thrilling things about being abroad is that life becomes all mysterious again. Back in the UK I never paid much attention to what I stumbled across on the streets but in South America every step outside became an adventure.
When I started to learn Spanish over here I discovered that the local shops were more interesting than I was used to. The only problem is that I didn’t know what half of them did.

Rubber Stamps?

I was both delighted and a bit mystified to find lots of little shops with signs outside saying Sellos de Goma. I had no idea what this was but it sounded kind of groovy. A quick look at my dictionary told me that we were looking at the heady, nay dizzying, world of stamps of rubber. This in itself wasn’t the exciting part; it was the sheer number of these places which got me scratching my head. Who ever knew that there was such a big demand for these things? Once I finished my Spanish lessons and started to get bogged down in red tape I realised that every office in town has an array of these things lined up in them to stamp their name onto my vast array of freshly photocopied documents.